Pavement sustainability requires balancing environmental, social and economic factors. Life cycle assessment is a useful tool for minimizing the environmental impact of building projects, particularly those involving road pavements. This paper presents an approach to choose a sustainable pavement design in the planning and design stages. The multi-criteria quantitative framework used for assessing the sustainable pavement design encompasses the resource consumption, environmental impact assessment and cost–benefit analysis. Economics of design was considered to ensure that the framework is not biased towards resource or environmental sustainability alone. In the present study, an investigation was conducted to evaluate the most sustainable pavement design among four available design options for Fiji Roads Authority for a stretch of road on Queen Elizabeth Drive. The four available design options are: asphalt over granular pavement, asphalt over a cementitious-treated base, thin asphalt over a cementitious-treated base, and full-depth asphalt. Each pavement option was evaluated based on subgrade CBR (California Bearing Ratio) values of 3% and 5%. A holistic approach incorporating sustainability principles was adopted to select the most sustainable pavement design with the optimal CBR for long-term performance.